James Bond’s Zinger

Apart from sounding like a burger, the Mitsubishi Zinger—or, to give its full model name these days in Taiwan, the Super Zinger (not kidding)—is one of those oddball vehicles I come across when editing Autocade. It’s a minivan based on a truck chassis—in this case the first-generation Mitsubishi Challenger—and a pretty ugly one at that. […]

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And now, Chrome changes fonts on some numerals

When I run a temperature or am sick, I try to find “lighter” things to do at work. Updating the information pages at the company website seemed to be the best thing: it’s not mentally taxing, but it has to be done.    And in doing so I found even more problems with Chrome.   […]

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“Liking” something on Facebook takes an awfully long time

There are things I “like” on Facebook, but as they can be run by organizations, I don’t see the need to reveal all my private information to them.    Once upon a time, it was quite easy to stick these “likes” into my limited profile friends’ category on friends. But a few months ago, Facebook […]

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Even as Liu Xiaobo gets a Nobel prize, Beijing can be smug

As I watched actress Liv Ullmann read Liu Xiaobo’s address, ‘I Have No Enemies’, on BBC World, I was quite moved.    The address is what the Nobel Prize-winning author and intellectual delivered prior to his sentencing by a Red Chinese court for subversion.    What is fascinating is the dignity with which the words […]

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Thoughts on Players, the Indian remake of The Italian Job

It’s been known for some time that Players, the official, licensed Indian remake of The Italian Job, will film in New Zealand, but what surprised me is that Wellington is to take the place of Torino in the 21st-century version.    At least they changed the name, because the American remake of The Italian Job […]

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Johnny Foreigner might be better at running a car company in Shanghai

As I made links for the last post, I noticed there were a lot of comments on AROnline about the replacement for the Roewe 750, the Chinese car that is based on the old Rover 75.    The replacement will be on the Opel Insignia platform, owned by GM. It’s been followed by a lot […]

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Roy Axe gives a sincere look at his career

Keith Adams is well known to many motorheads out there. We probably encountered him initially at his excellent AROnline, formerly The Unofficial Austin–Rover Resource. More recently, some of us have got to know Keith as a writer for Octane, where his well researched articles remind me of some of the best motoring journalists’ work. They […]

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Wikileaks’ brand of transparency is the enemy of the establishment

There are probably two things, chiefly, that fuel support for Julian Assange.    First, the idea that the mainstream media are not independent, but merely mouthpieces for the establishment. There’s some truth to this.    Secondly, the fact that Wikileaks is revealing, this time, things that we already knew: that governments are two-faced.    While […]

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The surprises in Firefox’s about:crashes

C’mon, Firefox! Can we get to 12 crashes per day and really make it a record?    When some friends began, helpfully, advising on these crashes, I really didn’t know what was causing them. It was only recently I found out about about:crashes so I could see what was the culprit.    The latest, according […]

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No changes to Opera’s typography in v. 11 beta

Opera 11 still has the font-changing bug that was in 10·63, as I found tonight: Underlined are the characters (from a post on this blog) that are not displaying in the same typeface as the rest of the text.    The quotation marks, all ligatures and any characters that follow a ligature before a space, […]

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